The distribution of software products exposes software manufacturers to an increased risk of software piracy. Because software products are generally distributed on some tangible media, such as a compact disk (CD), a software purchaser must be generally able to duplicate a software product from the media onto the purchaser's hard drive to properly use the software. Usually, a software product purchaser purchases only a license to use the software on a single computer (machine). Unfortunately, it can be difficult to limit the single-computer license purchaser to making only a single copy for the purchaser's single-computer use. Often, the purchaser will duplicate the software for use on other computers. Criminals will even duplicate the software for re-sale to others.
In an effort to reduce software piracy, various attempts have been made to limit the ability of users to duplicate software. In one approach, software is distributed with a printed password associated with the product packaging (e.g., printed on a CD case). The printed password corresponds to a stored password that is encoded into the software. When a user duplicates the software onto a hard drive, the user is prompted to input the printed password before the duplicated software will run for the first time. The input password is compared to the stored password that is encoded into the software. The software will be enabled only if a match is made. Unfortunately, this approach fails to prevent software pirates from creating illicit duplicates of the software. As long as a software pirate provides a copy of the printed password with each illicit copy of the software, the illicit copies will install and function properly.
Another attempt to limit the ability of a user to duplicate a software product, involves verifying the presence of an electronic software license, prior to enabling the execution of the software product. In this approach, an electronic license is generated and stored on the user's computer (e.g., hard drive) when the user attempts an installation of the software product. Subsequently, when the user attempts to run (i.e., execute) the software product, the software product will not execute if the electronic license is not present. However, this approach also has a shortcoming: the license can be copied and used with another software product that uses a similar licensing system. That is, a software pirate could purchase and install one software product and then copy the license from his hard drive to be used with other software products. Thus, the installed license could be misused to pirate other software products.
The anti-piracy approaches described above fail to prevent a user from using the electronic license provided by installing Product A to enable the use of an illicit copy of Product B. Therefore, there is a need in the art for an anti-piracy software license that will require a user to generate an electronic license to use a software product, but will also prohibit the duplication of a license for use with an illicit copy of a separate product.